’This is a joint letter to you and Joan.  It was begun on your birthday, and it has been written with a heavy, dull weight of sorrow on my heart, yet not unrelieved by the blessed consciousness of being drawn, as I humbly trust, nearer to our most merciful Father in heaven, if only by the very impossibility of finding help elsewhere.  It has not been a time without its own peculiar happiness.  How much of the Bible seemed endued with new powers of comfort....  How true it is, that they who seek, find.  “I sought the Lord, and He heard me.”  The closing chapters of the Gospels, 2 Corinthians, and how many other parts of the New Testament were blessings indeed!  Jeremy Taylor’s “Life of Christ,” and “Holy Living and Dying,” Thomas a Kempis, most of all of course the Prayer-book, and such solemn holy memories of our dear parents and uncles, such blessed hopes of reunion, death brought so near, the longing (if only not unprepared) for the life to come:  I could not be unhappy.  Yet I could not sustain such a frame of mind long; and then when I sank to the level of earthly thoughts, then came the weary heartache, and the daily routine of work was so distasteful, and I felt sorely tempted to indulge the “luxury of grief.”  But, thanks be to God, it is not altogether an unhealthy sorrow, and I can rest in the full assurance that all this is working out God’s purposes of love and mercy to us all—­Melanesians, Pitcairners, and all; and that I needed the discipline I know full well....

’Your loving Brother,

‘J.  C. P.’

It was not possible to touch at Norfolk Island, each attempt was baffled by the winds; and on September 16 the ‘Southern Cross’ anchored at Kohimarama, and a sad little note was sent up to the Primate with the announcement of the deaths and losses.

In spite of the comfort which, as this note said, Patteson felt ’in the innocence of their lives, and the constancy of their faith’ unto the death, the fate of these two youths, coming at the close of a year of unusual trial, which, as he had already said, had diminished his elasticity, had a lasting effect.  It seemed to take away his youthful buoyancy, and marked lines of care on his face that never were effaced.  The first letter after his return begins by showing how full his heart was of these his children:—­

’Kohimarama:  Sunday, September 18, 1864.

’My dearest Fan,—­I must try to write without again making my whole letter full of dear Edwin and Fisher.  That my heart is full of them you can well believe.

’These last five weeks have taught me that my reading of the Bible was perhaps more intellectual and perhaps more theological than devotional, to a dangerous extent probably; anyhow I craved for it as a revelation not only of truth, but of comfort and support in heavy sorrow.  It may be that when the sorrow does not press so heavily, the Bible cannot speak so wonderfully in that particular way of which I am writing, and it is right to read it theologically also.